Emission-monitoring systems have been developed to monitor emissions or exhaust gases produced during power generation. Generally, such emission-monitoring systems include a plurality of local monitoring devices wherein each local monitoring device monitors emissions produced by a gas turbine or boiler. Each of the local monitoring devices transmits emission information to a central monitoring device. When different types of local monitoring devices are utilized at different geographic sites, each local monitoring device may generate data using different formats, naming conventions, and values to indicate events, such as a fault event, a maintenance event, or a calibration event that are transmitted to the central monitoring computer.
A fault event occurs when any monitoring device is not functioning properly. Detection of the fault event is generally determined during an automatic calibration event when the monitoring device indicates gas levels that do not correlate with known calibration gas levels to within specified limits. A maintenance event occurs when either: (i) one or more devices operably coupled to a local monitoring device are shut down for maintenance, or (ii) a local monitoring device is shut down for maintenance. A calibration event occurs when a calibration gas is being supplied to one or more emission sensors coupled to a local monitoring device.
Because there is no standardized methodology for specifying event variables indicating whether an event has occurred, software developers have had an extremely difficult time attempting to display and manipulate emission information received from local monitoring devices each using site-specific event variable formats.
Thus, there is a need for an emission-monitoring system and method that standardizes event variables or tags received from different local monitoring devices for displaying and manipulating emission information from the local monitoring devices.